I was ten years old in 1982, and came of age at the beginning of the electronic gaming revolution, as toy companies realized there was a lot of allowance to claim if they could bring the arcade gaming experience into our homes and the palms of our hands.

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember some of the totally cool electronic hand held toys we coveted in our youth, like the Digital Daredevil and 3-D Thundering Turbo from Tomy, or Milton Bradley’s straight-from-the-future Microvision – a hand held game gadget that could play different games, just like an Atari or Intellivision! And it only weighed, like, ten pounds! If you were really lucky, maybe you had one of the Coleco games that looked an awful lot like an arcade cabinet. I had Pac-Man, my brother had Galaxian. Sure, they didn’t play as well as their arcade inspirations, but they looked so cool!

There were different games for different types of kids: the competitive kids liked the racing games, the elementary school equivalent of the jocks liked the sports “simulations,” and the nerds like me played the science fiction games.

I never liked the sports games, because I sucked at sports in real life, and video and electronic games were a way to escape from real life into worlds that only existed in imagination. In fact, when I got Star Raiders for my Atari, I built a fort that was actually the bridge of a starship, with the television as the main viewer and a chair from the kitchen as my captain’s chair. When I got my Vectrex, I frequently played it with a blanket draped over my head to block out everything else in the world, so I could pretend I really was sweeping mines in outer space.

Space was the most common “fantastic” setting for games back then, but in the early 80s, the role playing games that we all take for granted today were just beginning to filter down from the mysterious realm of hardcore wargamers into the more familiar surroundings of Toys R Us and Kmart, as the Dungeons & Dragons craze leveled up on a daily basis, (reaching the coveted Saturday Morning Cartoon status in 1983) so it was only natural that the two worlds would collide and create something that I could call my own: the electronic fantasy game.

Most of these games were variations on the basic dungeon-crawling theme, but they were just perfect in an age where imagination was still required to transform the monster that chased you around Atari’s Adventure from a duck into a dragon, and the animated Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit was scary and magnificent. This was a perfect blending of the two things my friends and I loved more than anything else in the world: cool electronic gadgets and the fantasy world we were just discovering.

Today, I look back at a couple of my favorites . . .

Dungeons & Dragons Computer Labyrinth Game
By Mattel
1980
“. . . an electronic game of strategy, imagination, and adventure . . .”



This was a classic dungeon crawl, where one or two players navigated a randomly generated map in search of a single box of treasure while trying to avoid a boodthirsty dragon. The game used sounds to tell you what was going on, like the dragon flying around or the player bumping into a wall, as you and a friend mapped out the ever-changing labyrinth.

This game included really cool lead miniatures, just like the ones the big kids used when they played with paper and dice and listened to Black Sabbath. It combined electronics and traditional board game pieces to create something that was just as fun to play alone as it was to play with a friend. You could even set up different difficulty levels to handicap one player if you wanted.

I didn’t own this game until a few years after it had been released, but once it was added to my inventory, I played it until it broke, which happened before I lost any of the pieces – a rarity in my pre-teen years.

Dungeons & Dragons Computer Fantasy Game
By Mattel
1981
“Find the magic arrow and shoot the dragon! If your aim is good, you win!”



Ah, how frequently I long for a simpler time when slaying a dragon was as easy as firing a magic arrow with good aim. Or, in this case, left, right, up or down.

Though it was little more than a D&D-branded hand held version of Hunt the Wumpus, this was still a lot of fun for a kid who was willing to use his imagination.

The randomly-generated dungeon was divided into a ten by ten grid, with each space on the grid representing a different room that could hold a deadly and potentially game-ending pit, a monster, or the magic dragon-slaying arrow. The player’s goal was to explore the dungeon, find the magic arrow, and then use it to slay the dragon. Depending on what difficulty you chose, you could start the game with a rope that gave you safe egress from the pits (rendering them annoying instead of game-ending) or the rope could also be randomly hidden somewhere in the dungeon.

Flashing LCD icons told the player what was in an adjacent room, so you could avoid the annoying bats that picked you up and dropped you in a random room, or find the tools you needed to complete the quest.

For all its apparent simplicity, it was really a challenge if played on the higher levels, and because it ran on watch batteries, you’d get bored with it long before they ever ran out of juice. I played this for hours between shots on film sets, though I rarely got good scores, because the game was timed and didn’t have a pause feature. I’d frequently put it down when I was called in to shoot, and come back to discover that my score was the dreaded 99. I think this helped create my philosophy that playing the game and enjoying it was more important than winning.

The Dark Tower
By Milton Bradley
1981



“You’re lost in a forbidding land . . . your warriors are dying . . . food is low. But still you must conqueror THE DARK TOWER!”

I saved my absolute favorite electronic fantasy game for last: a quest that felt epic in scale, that was as much fun to play with friends as it was to play alone. It could even be rendered portable with a little ten year-old ingenuity.

The Dark Tower was a fantasy quest game that pitted players against each other in a race to travel through four different realms, collect three different keys, and retrieve an ancient magic scepter, which had been stolen by a Tyrant King, who was also known as “Sir not appearing in this game.”

The centerpiece of the game, literally and figuratively, was a tall black tower that sat at the center of the board and kept track of players’ progres through the game as they visited crypts and tombs, replenished their food and gold supply at sanctuaries, and battled band after band of evil Brigands. Inside the tower was a small computer and a spinning series of absolutely gorgeous and perfectly-drawn images that showed the players what was going on during the game: when you battled Brigands, an LED display would show you how many warriors you had, along with a picture of them, and then do the same with the brigands. Simple electronic beeps and tunes heightened the excitement as the game unfolded.



While you traveled around the board, you could visit crypts and tombs in search of treasure and keys, and a magic sword which could slay the obligatory dragon. You could visit bazaars and purchase food, additional warriors, or healers and scouts to protect you from plague or getting lost. In multi-player games, you could get a wizard to join your party and use him to curse the other players.

Since I spent so much of my youth on film sets, portability was an important factor in any game, as was the ability to play it alone, since I was frequently the only kid at work. The Dark Tower had a built-in one player option, and if you were willing to draw a copy of the four realms on some notebook paper (I was) then you could just take the tower with you in your backpack, and leave the mundane world of the early 1980s for a magical and dangerous fantasy realm any time, with ease.

Milton Bradley was sued shortly after the game was released, and they stopped producing it. It quickly went out of print, and is highly prized by collectors today. There is a wonderful flash-based version of the game that can be played online . . . but don’t complain to me if you get in trouble for leaving the mundane world of 2007 for a magical and dangerous fantasy realm.

Credits: Computer Fantasy Game image comes from Hand Held Museum dot Com. Computer Labyrinth Game images come from Board Game Geek dot Com, and The Dark Tower images come from Well of Souls dot Com and Google.

Wil Wheaton’s aim is true.

I was born in 1972, and came of age in the 1980s, which means that I am of the video game generation. Though my family started with the Odyssey2 before moving to the Atari 2600 and Atari 400 (membrane keyboards FTW!) much of my gaming took place in various arcades, or local businesses — pizza parlors, drug stores, bowling alleys, liquor stores and even a head shop — and they played such an important role in my life, I still have all kinds of very clear and powerful memories associated with certain games and the places I played them. It's good that I do, because arcades in America are vanishing like rainforests.

Come with me, for a moment, back to the days when a quarter really meant something, and take a look at some of those games and places . . .

Donkey Kong will forever be associated with Verdugo Bowling Alley in La Crescenta, because that's where I first saw it. In fact, I thought it was some weird bowling game because the barrells on level one look like bowling balls, if you're nine years old and in a bowling alley. Donkey Kong Junior, on the other hand, will always remind me of my Aunt Val's house, where my cousin Jack's outrageously rich absentee father had actually bought him a stand up Nintendo cabinet of his own.

Another Nintendo staple, Punch Out!!, takes me back to Malibu Grand Prix, a Southern California staple in the pre-lawsuit-as-lottery '80s where adults could race cars around a twisty track while their kids played mini golf outside or tons of video games inside. I was never any good at Punch Out!!, but for some reason when I played it at Malibu Grand Prix in Northridge, I could make it all the way to Bald Bull, which isn't particularly impressive if you didn't suck at it, but still makes me feel like I accomplished something. One time, I even knocked him down once before he turned me into moosh.

Centipede will always be tied to the smell of mojo potatoes and the din of some sporting event I didn't care about on a projection television at Shakeys Pizza in Tujunga, where this young couple in their 20s with really awesome '70s hair that was beginning to turn into unfortunate '80s hair let me play their last man at the cocktail version because their pizza was ready.

Ms. Pac-Man will always be associated with the head shop in Sunland, where I got to the pretzel level the first time I ever played the game while my mom was, uh, shopping, in that area behind the saloon doors that was just for grown-ups.

Super Pac-Man, Defender, Gyruss, and Mouse Trap drop me through the worm hole into Sunland Discount Variety, a sort of family-run grocery and hardware store that pre-dates minimarts. I can close my eyes right now, and hear the old mechanical cash register and whirring Slush Puppy machine (ten pumps of syrup, please.) I can feel the cool dusty linoleum tiles beneath my bare feet when I stopped on my way back home from the community pool over several childhood summers, the chlorine burning my eyes and lungs, always afraid that the old Chinese man who worked there wouldn't accept my soaking wet dollar bills from my soaking wet pocket, or would enforce the "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy announced on the front door.

Crystal Castles, Demolition Derby (did anyone ever get to see more of that girl between levels?), and Journey conjure up images of a Bally's Alladin's Castle at the mall in Eugene, Oregon, during the filming of Stand By Me, where my mom took me on my days off. Burger Time and Tutankham will always remind me of the smell of chlorine and concrete from the basement-level pool at the Eugene Hilton where we lived that summer. Lunar Lander reminds me of this Holiday Inn in Redding, California, where we stayed during the filming of Stand By Me's train trestle sequence. It was another indoor pool, but this one had a tropical theme with a giant waterfall, and if you didn't mind a mild electric shock, holding your wet hand over the coin slots gave you free credits.

I really miss those days when Chuck E. Cheese's had more than an assortment of ticket-dispensing coin suckers, I could find arcade games wherever I went, and every mall worth visiting had both a video arcade and an ice skating rink. But the video arcade's days were numbered as soon as home computers and console systems started to catch up to their arcade counterparts. Sadly, in their efforts to keep quarters flowing, I believe arcade owners and video game manufacturers hastened their own demise.

Though the great Home Video Game Crash is widely accepted to have happened in 1983, It was in the early '90s that arcades started to really fall apart, as unique games like Tempest, Robotron, Tapper and Gorf were steadily replaced by games that were all essentially derivative of Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. While it took entirely different skills to beat Vanguard than it took to beat Crazy Climber than it took to beat Galaxian than it took to beat Dragon's Lair, a fighting game was a fighting game was a fighting game. Jump and leg sweep, mash the buttons, and repeat. Oh! A fatality. Awesome.

In my local arcade, which was called The Enterprise (no relation) and then The Cone Factory (when waffle cones ruled the world around 1985) it started when the sit-down Spy Hunter and Mach 3 were pulled out and replaced with two identical Mortal Kombat machines. Don't get me wrong; those games were fun and I'll still drop the occasional quarter into MKII and see how far I can get, but did we really need an arcade full of them? Where's my Bump-n-Jump? Where's my Wizard of Wor? And who let the damn dogs out? Who? Who? Who?!

As arcades became neglected and the games all blurred together into a beige collection of copycats, home consoles and PCs outpaced their cabinet cousins, and I had a hard time coming up with a good reason to even bother leaving the house. Who wants to go spend a dollar a minute on some fighting game when you can spend forty dollars once for a hundred hours of well-developed story and characters you can get emotionally attached to right at home? I'm bored out of my mind with FPS games now, but when they came out, Doom and Quake were new, and different, and fun. After I grew tired of them, I moved on to RPGs like Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, and I didn't miss the arcade experience at all; by the time Vice City came along, quarters were, for the first time in a decade, primarily used in parking meters.

But in the back of my mind, and on long lonely drives where a melancholy saxophone solo seemed to come out of nowhere to accompany me, I'd think about Tron, and Star Castle, and Mr. Do! and Zaxxon. I'd hear the jukebox playing Journey and Judas Priest and Asia and Van Halen. I'd smell the waffle cones and feel the quarters heavily banging against my thigh as they weighed down the pocket of my two-toned corduroy OP shorts, and I wouldn't miss the games as much as I'd miss the places where I played them.

If you're a Generation Xer like me, odds are you have at least one specific arcade you can recall, where you probably spent your weight in quarters every summer. Don't you miss it? Sure, it's fun to play games like Guitar Hero, and the computing power in one Xbox 360 probably exceeds the total computing power of everything combined in Captain Video circa 1982, but wouldn't it be great to walk into a real arcade and choose from thirty or forty different games, all of them unique?

I think the current generation of gamers, though they have access to more actual players than we did, are really missing out on the social and community aspect of the video arcade. Where I would spend my time haunting Discount Variety or the 7-11 with Super Mario Brothers and Gyruss, (and occasionally taking a trip to the Pac Man arcade in Pasadena, a video game Shangrila for those of us who grew up in Sunland/Tujunga) my kids and their friends just play online, and never even see the people they're playing with.

My kids' generation, with their online gaming and its associated sense of anonymity and unaccountability, aren't getting the same social workout that we all got when we were kids. When I played a two player game against another kid and I beat him, if I taunted him mercilessly and made explicit references to his mother's sex life and my role in it, he would have justifiably kicked the everliving shit out of me; so I learned that it was always a good idea to be gracious in victory and defeat. Contrast that with the foul and profane behavior exhibited in today's online gaming worlds, by players who are old enough to know better, or young enough not to care. It takes a lot of fun out of the gaming experience, and eventually results in something out of Lord of the Flies. This type of anti-social behavior spills over onto online communities and has been the subject of funny-because-it's-true comics by Penny Arcade and xkcd.

Yes, arcades were dark and loud and smelled funny, and they probably confused our parents the same way MySpace confuses me, but they were real places where we could escape into countless different worlds, and challenge our friends (and the occasional stranger) for nothing more important than getting our initials on the high score list (it's strange how so many of us had the initials ASS, XXX and SEX isn't it?) Because they were real places, staffed by real people, we had to conduct ourselves with a certain amount of respect, because there weren't rotating proxies and anonymous gamer tags to hide behind. It wasn't about spawn camping or kill-stealing or chat flooding or any of the other childish bullshit that makes so many online games and communities barely tolerable; it was about the interaction with our friends and the challenge these different games presented to us. I'm pretty sure it was about the fun, too.

I know I'm not the first parent to hit his mid-thirties and start demanding that the damn kids get off his lawn — I'm sure my parents were sad as drive-ins were torn down to make way for strip malls, and I'm sure they complained that we were playing in video arcades instead of riding bikes, and watching video tapes instead of going to the movies. I'm sure that my kids will one day complain that my grandkids immerse themselves alone in the holodeck rather than killing boars in the forest or charging into battle with Leeroy Jenkins.

But I do believe that this moment in time is unique, because video arcades are closing all over the place, and this enormously important part of my generation's coming of age will probably be gone forever, unless some billionaire (I'm looking at you, Mark Cuban) decides to open a chain of truly classic 1980s video arcades, complete with Journey and Rush on the jukebox, and dispensers that give us five tokens for a dollar. Hey, there was a resurgence of '50s diners in the '80s, so why not a resurgence of classic '80s arcades in the new millennium? Hell, it could even be a place where the damn kids today and curmudgeons like me could find some common ground.

I call first on Defender.

Wil Wheaton has Pac-Man fever, and the only prescription is more tokens.